ICS SDK Finally Hits The Streets – Now The Real Race Begins…

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, people of all ages…. get ready for the next generation of Android. As it turns out, even though the official version of Ice Cream Sandwich is still a few days away from being officially released with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the search engine giant decided to give everyone a taste of what is coming. It was announced a few hours ago that the SDK for the highly anticipated Android 4.0 has just been released and it is available for download. The servers are currently getting hit rather hard due to the massive amount of people trying to get their hands on an early preview of the frozen treat, but it does look like the real race is about to commence. Now, if you are trying to figure out what I mean, I am talking about ports. This will undoubtedly lead to the first ICS ports to start surfacing on devices other than the ones officially announced to carry this. The question that we all have at this point is which one will be first? Android development teams across the globe are currently working on this and we should likely have the first ports within a few weeks. But, if experience can indeed be a teacher, my advise would be to not expect something completely functional coming out of an SDK. If you don’t believe me, try and look for a Honeycomb port for any device and see what you can and cannot do with it. I am not certain whether this will be any different from other SDK ports, but we will likely start seeing actual sources for this OS and its kernels soon, so the real ports will come soon.

Having said all that, XDA TV star azrienoch has posted a link for the apps which were pulled from the SDK, courtesy of p3droid over at mydroidworld forums. The download contains all the apps that deal with ICS and you are free to get them going on your device as well, but due to them being for a newer OS, they may or may not be backward compatible with GB or even HC. In other words, you can install them, but whether they work or not is a completely different issue. As a good precaution, please try and perform a NANDROID before installing these apps.

Well, what are you waiting for? Go, go quickly and get your hands in the future. Also, if you care to share your thoughts and opinions regarding this new OS and your impressions from playing with it, we would love to hear it.

You can find the SDK on the official Android website here, and the thread with the link for the apps dump can be found here.

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